Tool to Save a Range of Disk Clusters to a File

Posted by Synetech inc. on Super User See other posts from Super User or by Synetech inc.
Published on 2010-02-27T15:33:57Z Indexed on 2011/01/08 4:55 UTC
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Hi,

Yesterday I deleted a (fragmented) archive file only to find that it did not extract correctly, so I was left stranded. Fortunately there was not much space free on the drive, so most of the space marked as free was from the now-deleted archive. I pulled up a disk editor and—painfully—managed to get a list of cluster ranges from the FAT that were marked as unused. My task then was to save these ranges of clusters to files so that I could examine them to try to determine which parts were from the archive and recombine them to attempt to restore the deleted file.

This turned out to be a huge pain in the butt because the disk editor did not have the ability to select a range of clusters, so I had to navigate to the start of each cluster and hold down Ctrl+Shift+PgDn until I reached the end of the range (which usually took forever!)

I did a quick Google search to see if I could find a command-line tool (preferably with Windows and DOS versions) that would allow me to issue a commands such as:

SAVESECT -c 0xBEEF 0xCAFE FOO.BAR ::save clusters 0xBEEF-0xCAFE to FOO.BAR
SAVESECT -s 1111 9876 BAZ.BIN ::save sectors 1111-9876 to BAZ.BIN

Sadly my search came up empty.

Any ideas?


Thanks!

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